This post is dedicated to Jorge Calvillo Garcia. He was one of the 22 victims in the terrorist attack in El Paso on August 3, 2019. Jorge was at the WalMart to support his granddaughter’s soccer team’s fundraiser. As the gunman approached the soccer team, Jorge stepped between him and his granddaughter and her teammates. He lost his life protecting young children.

When I heard that the shooter was only 21 years old, I couldn’t help but wonder, had he been exposed to anti-racist lessons that modeled acceptance? Had he learned that the Latinx people, who he specifically targeted, were people with beautiful cultures and gifts?

You might read that phrase above, “anti-racist lessons” and think, well I don’t teach racist lessons! Of course not. But do you have dialogue with your students about race and other cultures? Do you expose students to races and cultures through literature and other media that represent children in your classroom, but also represent those who they might not have daily interactions? It is not enough to not be a racist. Silence on these important issues just might be exactly what allowed the hate of the Latinx people to fester in the shooter’s heart. Check out this article from EdWeek about ways we can teach important life lessons in our classroom.

We can no longer be silent.

This post is one of twenty-two that will share lessons, books, research, anecdotes, and helpful articles to guide you in your next steps. It’s time to talk racism, and we want to make sure you can do it well. Bookmark this link to visit all 22 posts this month.

The links to the book in this post are affiliate links. It doesn’t cost you anything extra, and Amazon shares a few pennies with me for sending you their way, which I put toward giveaways for my followers.

Using Mentor Texts

Mentor texts are the perfect tool to teach mini-lessons over several standards and skills across subjects, and also provide a way to teach the required content while representing races, cultures, family dynamics, and other differences that make diversity so beautiful. Read more about the importance of diverse mentor texts here.

A beautiful mentor text called Dreamers that was just published in 2018 by Yuyi Morales, a Mexican-American author, tells the story of what happened after she immigrated here with her two-month-old son and came upon the most wondrous place- the public library! She learned English and also discovered her love of story-telling through the beautiful picture books in this place of amor. It’s a reminder that we all have gifts and we take them with us wherever we go.

Dreamers Lesson Ideas

The word count of Dreamers by Yuyi Morales may make you think this book isn’t appropriate to read to upper grades, however, the words Yuyi uses are high-level vocabulary. Words like resplendent, immigrants, ancestors, suspicious, improbable, and resilience would make great context clue and reference skills lessons.

The art in the book is beautiful (make sure to point out to students that Yuyi wrote AND illustrated the book) and you could study each page for several minutes to learn even more about her life and what she feels is important. One thing that appears on every page is a monarch butterfly. Monarch butterflies are migratory insects, living in both Mexico and the United States. The butterfly is a great example of symbolism- connecting Yuyi and the monarch as Mexican-American migrants.

The themes of the book revolve around determination, resilience, and hope. Students can support these themes with evidence in the art and the words of the text. Yuyi arrived without English and learned to speak it, in spite of mistakes. The library became a place of hope for her, a home for her. She learned to read and also learned to have her own voice. It is where she figured out she loved stories and storytelling, and drove her to become an author.

Make sure to also read the author’s note at the end, where she shares about her life and the reason she wrote the book. This will lead to several opportunities for personal narrative writing, as students can reflect on their own dreams and gifts, and even places that are special and important to them.

You can download activities for the mentor text, Dreamers by Yuyi Morales for free here.

You can also read more ideas to go with the book from the author herself here.

Easing Discomfort

I hope that the ideas I’ve shared using this mentor text help ease any discomfort you may have about including anti-racist lessons in your classroom. Simple exposure and helping students connect to others as humans is a great first step. I know that sometimes we worry too much about saying the wrong thing, or not knowing how to answer a question that may arise, but silence is not the answer. It’s okay to not know. It’s okay to make mistakes and then share that growth with your students as you learn. We must take steps to do the right thing for the future of our world. You could be the one that makes the difference in a child’s heart. You could be the one that helps a student learn that differences are beautiful. You could be the one to plant the seed of acceptance.

Click here to read more about what happened in El Paso, and more about this special blogger event.

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It’s not just a hashtag. It’s not just the latest buzzword. Incorporating diverse books into your lessons is important for so many reasons.

And it’s important for ALL classrooms… making sure to share books with black and brown characters, various family dynamics, and cultural differences aren’t JUST for the classrooms that have all of these unique qualities included in them.

Rudine Sims Bishop shared this about using diverse books:

Books are sometimes windows, offering views of worlds that may be real or imagined, familiar or strange. These windows are also sliding glass doors, and readers have only to walk through in imagination to become part of whatever world has been created or recreated by the author. When lighting conditions are just right, however, a window can also be a mirror. Literature transforms human experience and reflects it back to us, and in that reflection we can see our own lives and experiences as part of a larger human experience. Reading, then, becomes a means of self-affirmation, and readers often seek their mirrors in books.

Yes, we want students to have mirrors in books, where they can find themselves and be affirmed… but let’s not forget about the windows and doors- exposing students to new views of the world is important for students to learn acceptance and to be culturally aware.

The Day You Begin by Jacqueline Woodson is an excellent book to use to introduce the AWESOMENESS of the diversity in the classroom to your students! You can purchase the unit you see in this picture here.

Get a free mentor text unit!

I would love to share some ideas and ready-to-implement activities with you that can be done with mentor texts! Let me know what grade you teach below and I will send a mentor text unit right to your inbox for free!

Choosing Mentor Texts

As you are choosing those quality books that help students read like writers and write like readers, keep in mind the students in your own class for those mirrors, but also look for texts that will provide windows and doors for ALL students. Choose books that reflect the diversity of your community, but also other communities, too.

I am sharing some of my favorite books in this post using Amazon affiliate links. Using these links doesn’t cost you anything extra but I get a few cents for sending you their way, helping me fund book giveaways for teachers!

Are you choosing books that include people of different races and cultures? Do students know that some women wear hijabs, even if no one in their class or family does? Do students realize that some families live in apartments in the city, even if they live in a house in a neighborhood? Use a book like, Come On, Rain! by Karen Hesse to teach writer’s craft, figurative language, new vocabulary, and small moment stories, all while sharing about a little Black girl named Tessie and her mama waiting for the rain to begin in the hot city.

Or, here’s another mentor text with fantastic figurative language about a little girl who is determined to catch a chicken on her grandmother’s farm. For a kid growing up in the city or suburbs, The Chicken-Chasing Queen of Lamar County by Janice Harrington might be the first exposure they have to present-day life on a farm!

Are characters in the books participating in modern activities, or are they all based on historical events? Shaking Things Up is a collection of poems about past and present women who have made a difference in our world, like Angela Zhang – a modern-day Asian-American teenager who is working toward the cure for cancer!

Make sure that the only “diverse texts” you are sharing aren’t just about past events, or only shared during Black History Month or Women’s History Month. Of course, there is NOTHING wrong with reading books that share about times of segregation (for example) because students need to learn about this time and reflect on the similarities of discrimination that still occur today… but how are students seeing children of color TODAY in the texts you are choosing?

Those Shoes by Maribeth Boelts is a great example of a mentor text that ALL students can learn a lesson from while also featuring black and brown characters. The main character, Jeremy, lives with his grandmother in this story, revealing a family dynamic that some students may relate to or some may now understand exists. It’s a fabulous mentor text that can be used to model dialogue, teach point of view and perspective, and contains great vocabulary!

These book examples don’t even scratch the surface of all of the fabulous mentor texts that can be used to teach ELA and also provide mirrors, windows, and doors for your students. I have been more conscious of using books in my resources that will provide more inclusivity. Making sure students feel represented in culture, gender, race, religion, and family structures is so important. You can check out some of my units where I focused solely on celebrating diversity here.

I also use a variety of mentor texts in all of my resources, if you want to just shop around.

I’m always open to add more mentor texts to my list, so let me know if you have a favorite you’d like to see in a future unit!

Mentor texts are pieces of literature that are read (and re-read) in order to be understood, studied, and used as models. A good mentor text should serve many purposes.

My most favorite (and most suggested) types of mentor texts are picture books.

Why picture books?

Picture books are short and sweet. Generally, you can get through a picture book in one sitting. That means the students stay interested and engaged. Plus, the illustrations provide visual stimulation and can even help students with context.

BUT MOST IMPORTANTLY…

Picture books are the perfect texts to use to try out new reading strategies, connect readers to writers by identifying a variety of styles and crafts that authors use, AND use for imitation purposes in writing!

OH! AND BONUS!

Not only can you teach reading and writing standards using mentor texts, but you can also integrate other content (social studies, science, and even math), provide life lessons and teach social/emotional strategies, and allow multicultural literature (also what is known as ‘diverse books’) to be windows, doors, and mirrors to the world. We want students to not only be able to identify with characters in a book, but also be exposed to other cultures, views, and experiences that they may not know otherwise.

Books are sometimes windows, offering views of worlds that may be real or imagined, familiar or strange. These windows are also sliding glass doors, and readers have only to walk through in imagination to become part of whatever world has been created and recreated by the author. When lighting conditions are just right, however, a window can also be a mirror. Literature transforms human experience and reflects it back to us, and in that reflection we can see our own lives and experiences as part of the larger human experience. Reading, then, becomes a means of self-affirmation, and readers often seek their mirrors in books. ~Rudine Sims Bishop

Picture books can be combined with poems, articles, and other media to help students display learning from a variety of sources.

Mentor texts can be combined to help students integrate content and construct their own writing pieces that display evidence of their learning.

Choosing Mentor Texts for Your Lessons

Integrate science and social studies content while also teaching reading strategies and writing techniques!

Along with picture books (fiction and nonfiction), some other examples of great mentor texts are articles, poems, short stories, and a chapter or section from novels. (An entire novel would essentially be made up of MANY mentor texts because remember, a mentor text should be shorter and easily re-read to apply multiple techniques and strategies.)

A mentor text should first be a book that YOU LIKE. If you don’t like the book, that emotion will certainly come through in your reading.

Choose texts that reflect the students in your classroom when possible, so that they can see themselves in the books you read.

Maximize your teaching time by choosing books that also relate to the content you are teaching in other subjects.

Planning With Mentor Texts

Since mentor texts can be used for multiple lessons, strategies, and subjects, it’s important to look at the book through different lenses. This means reading the book a few times with a different rhetorical pair of glasses each time.

Get the free guide to plan for your mini-lessons by clicking on the image above!

For me, the first time I read a mentor text, I allow a mentor sentence to hop off the pages at me. This is a sentence with amazing style, language, or a specific grammar skill that really stands out. This sentence can then be studied, analyzed, and imitated over the course of the week in order to help students carry that style or structure over into their writing. Visit this page for even more information about using mentor sentences in the classroom!

Mentor sentences can be found in great mentor texts! Use mentor sentences to help students apply better craft, style, and language to their own writing.

Next, I reflect on the story as a whole and re-read with “reading teacher glasses” on. Sometimes, there are specific standards you know you need to work on, so you may review the story with those in mind. Sometimes, a strategy or standard is very obvious; for instance, a book with a strong character would make for a good mentor text to teach character development.

Use a mentor text to analyze a character through their thoughts, words, and actions.

There are some skills that you can review with just about every book, such as inferring, summarizing, theme, point of view, to name a few.

*IMPORTANT* Just because a book can be used for many skills doesn’t mean you should cram them all in! Pick one or two per subject and dive deeper into those with each book over the course of a week or two rather than skimming the surface of several skills. 

Last, I hone in on the author’s craft, organization, and text type with my “writing teacher glasses” on. How is the book modeling good writing for students that they should practice and imitate? Did the author use a great introduction to grab your attention? Did she use a good bit of figurative language? Was the text a good example of a memoir? Additionally, does the topic of the text lead to a good writing prompt for students to respond, or write their own piece?

Mentor texts are great jumping-off-points for students to write their own stories similar to books.

Also, keep in mind the ways you can integrate media with mentor texts- present content in various ways through video, infographics, and songs, and allow students to identify what they are able to learn in these formats that they didn’t (or couldn’t) in the mentor text.

Utilize other media when you can with the mentor texts you use in the classroom to enable students to make connections and integrate information from a variety of sources.

Teaching With Mentor Texts

No matter what type of mentor text you are using, I encourage teachers to use their mentor texts in mini-lessons with their students. I prefer the “I Do, We Do, You Do” mini-lesson model, also called “gradual release” or “scaffolding.” It prevents a lesson from being a lecture and moves the responsibility from the teacher to the students.

Use the gradual release “I Do We Do You Do” mini-lesson structure with mentor texts to help students practice reading and writing strategies. You can get access to download the free guide by clicking on the image above.

When possible, I suggest reading the entire mentor text aloud for the “first read” without doing any stopping or modeling. Students will be able to enjoy the text as well as get a better grasp of the book without interruption. Then, simply refer back to a part or parts of the text that assist your lesson covering skills such as point of view or perspective, theme, character and setting, and so on.

Mentor texts can provide more than just opportunities to practice reading and writing techniques. Look for books that also lend themselves to help students be more empathetic and understanding of others’ experiences.

But of course, it isn’t always conducive to your lessons to read the entire book without stopping. Sometimes, it is beneficial to give students a task during the first read, or for you to do a think-aloud and model a skill during the first read. For example, maybe you want students to pay attention to figurative language used through the whole story, or perhaps you are modeling how to use context clues to determine the meaning of a word, or maybe your strategy requires you to do think-alouds to show synthesizing, or change over time. These would be times when you might have students take notes or when you work through an organizer together as you read.

“I DO”

During the “I Do” part of your lesson, you’ll want to model a strategy or technique by doing think-alouds and/or working through part of an organizer. Use consistent language to name the strategy or technique as you model for them.

“WE DO”

During the “We Do” part of your lesson, the students should work alongside you with prompts and clues from you. Allow them to do the thinking for you, but provide support and ask questions that help them understand their own processes.

“YOU DO”

Finally, the “You Do” time means students are practicing without assistance from you (except if you need to clarify some confusion). The students could work independently, or if the strategy is still new to them, I suggest partnering students or having them work in groups to discuss their thoughts.

Check out a collection of ways to use mentor texts and examples of lessons!

Link it back!

It’s always important to come back together whole group, even if all of the students were successful in the “You Do” time, in order to review the strategy one more time and help students make a plan for how they will use this in their own reading and writing. Application will not occur without guiding students to think about HOW they can do it… and yes, sometimes that means requiring them to do it as proof.

Checklists are a great way to help students remember the strategies and techniques you have taught them to use.

Check out the video below to see me model a mini-lesson using Ada Twist, Scientist as the mentor text!

You can get the lesson and activities I share in this video for free!

Need the book? Get the mentor text, Ada Twist, Scientist by Andrea Beaty!
(Amazon affiliate link, which doesn’t cost you anything extra and I get a couple pennies for suggesting it to you!)

Are you interested in getting ready-made mentor text lessons for the week?

Join the club! No really… there’s a club!

Transform Your Teaching!

I would love to help you incorporate mentor texts in your classroom! Download the free guide for mentor text mini-lessons now, and get this rolling in your own classroom!

When I first started teaching, I would sit down at the beginning of every school year with a blank calendar, and I’d map out what unit I’d be working on each week in every subject for the entire year… except it never failed… I would get to March, the month before testing season, and realize I still had more content than weeks left to teach it.

EVERY. YEAR.

I did this pre-planning ritual as if something was going to magically change from the previous year. And guess what? It never did…

…until I realized how much I could integrate my content during reading, writing, grammar, science, and social studies.

Then everything changed.

Now, I won’t sit here and tell you I ever mastered teaching 180 days of material in 140 (or less). That would be a lie.

But content integration made everything move more fluidly throughout the day, it saved me valuable time, and the students were actually soaking up more of the content than when I was teaching everything in isolation!

I’m going to share some strategies below to help you avoid making the same mistake I did! Don’t write this off just because it isn’t August and over half of the year has gone by… start now and it will still help get you through the rest of this year!

Watch me speak about my ideas in this video, or continue reading below!

Use Mentor Texts

If you have followed me for even five minutes, you know I am a huge advocate for using mentor texts. A mentor text is a short piece of text (in other words, one that can be “digested” in a reasonable amount of time) that will serve as a model for at least one or two skills, but your goal is to cover MANY skills. Read even more about maximizing time (and enroll in a free course)! As a fellow teacher, Abbie Taylor, said, “The kids get to know the book so well, everything else makes so much more sense!” That is truly the work of a good mentor text!

If your schedule looks anything like most teachers, you have MAYBE 45 minutes to teach science or social studies. Some of you have 45 minutes to teach science AND social studies. So how in the world are you going to teach all of your content in those few minutes each day AND ACTUALLY MAKE IT STICK?

The simple answer is, you don’t! You’ve got to maximize the time you have with your students to get results. Stop reading one book or article for a reading lesson, a different book or article for a writing lesson, and then ANOTHER book or article for a social studies lesson! Use that ONE mentor text for as many things as you can- and tie in your science or social studies content to truly get the most bang for your buck.

Let’s look at a couple of examples:

Do you teach about the effects humans have on shaping the landscape?

A River Ran Wild by Lynne Cherry tells the story of the Nashua River and how it changed over time with settlers, industry, and pollution. It helps give the students an idea of how, even though we don’t see the damage we are causing now, future generations are affected. I would read this book during my reading workshop and tie it to my science lessons on pollution. This is a great book to use when exploring illustrations as well as talking about cause and effect.

Skills to cover with just this one mentor text: identifying humans’ effect on environment, demonstrating change over time (timelines), identifying cause and effect, using complex sentences to write about cause and effect, and writing a persuasive piece about environmental issues.

Do you teach about Westward Expansion?

Apples To Oregon by Deborah Hopkinson is NOT nonfiction, but it is still a fantastic book to use when teaching about Westward Expansion. It’s a humorous tall tale about a family moving to Oregon, and Papa doesn’t want to leave behind his apple trees. Although it is fiction, it still represents the hardships the families faced along the trail, and does so in a little bit of a lighter way than a book like Dandelions by Eve Bunting does (which is another fantastic mentor text that I highly recommend). Apples to Oregon is full of fantastic figurative language which makes for great mentor sentence and writing lessons.

Skills to cover with just this one mentor text: hardships of pioneer life, identifying figurative language, discovering character motives, identifying theme, distinguishing traits of tall tales, and writing narratives from a pioneer’s perspective

These books are featured in my mentor text and mentor sentence lessons! Find A River Ran Wild activities in Volume 2 Unit 4, and find Apples to Oregon in the Westward Expansion mini-unit.

Check out other mini-units for more content-aligned mentor texts!

Are you interested in getting ready-made mentor text lessons for the week?

Join the club!

No really… there’s a club!

Use High-Interest Passages

The keyword above is high-interest. We teach about things that the kids have no connection to, no experience with, and sometimes, let’s admit, are downright boring. I don’t know about you, but reading the textbook was not one of my fond memories from grade school.

But let me tell you what does make an impact… when teaching about the American Revolution, read about all the insane Acts that crazy King George passed and thinking about how that would have felt as a colonist. Instead of just reading about the Declaration of Independence, teach them about this document actually being treasonous at that time! Get them hooked in and excited about things, and all the learning will happen without them even realizing they are doing hard, rigorous work! (Check out this American Revolution set of paired texts for the topics I mentioned above, and more!)

Not only will getting the kids excited and interested about what they’re learning help it stick, but you’ll also be able to double dip with these articles in reading and writing.

Just as reading mentor texts during ELA time helps cover other content skills, using content-aligned articles and passages during ELA is going to give you back some of that time you need to do some hands-on learning during that allotted science or social studies time.

I will be sharing more in an upcoming article about how I used these high-interest paired texts to teach close reading, finding and citing evidence with text dependent questions, and writing constructed responses!

In the meantime, check out more high-interest passages in my store!

LOOKING FOR COMPLETE ELA MENTOR TEXT LESSONS?

If you have trouble using one book across ALL content, I have you covered with my Everything But The Books ELA Units! These units use a mentor text for reading, writing, grammar, and also touch on science or social studies PLUS I have included high-interest passages for each mentor text to pair up with text-based writing prompts and TDQs!

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